“I’d like to start by saying that I am a photographer because an image is something immediate, in which there is everything at once. Words, on the other hand, are one after another and putting them in line is not easy for me, and trying to share an experience like the one in Haiti is even more difficult.
However, I will try.
Some time ago I read a sentence somewhere that made me smile a lot, it said something like: “We should always remember that the universe, apart from a small and insignificant exception, is made of others”.
Our culture focuses a lot on the individual, the assertion of the individual, the success of the individual. But what is an individual without the others? Which self-assertion can there be without the others?
Haiti is beautiful and is full of others; of those who we forget about while we are busy asserting ourselves. But the others are the ones that define us; they are our boundary and our horizon. They are the mirror that every morning you have to look at before going out, and you cannot forget the others without losing yourself.
Haiti is beautiful, and beauty is often fragile, and it can hurt. Haiti is beautiful because it tells us what we are, sometimes softly and with a smile, sometimes shouting at us and smacking us.
Working with the foundation has been a journey, outwards and inwards, in a spiral walking forward, but always moving towards the centre.
I bring with me the faces and smiles, most of all the smiles, of the children who can smile thanks to the initiatives of the foundation.
Here I always tried to leave a smile in the others, I don’t want people to think of me for something particular, but that thinking of me can make them smile; I collected a lot of smiles in Haiti that I carry around for when it will be difficult to smile.
A technical note: for the photos I didn’t use lenses that would have allowed me to take photos from a distance, I didn’t want to do a safari photo, I wanted to be part of what I was photographing, I wanted the others to see with my eyes.”
